Diners can infer a great deal about a restaurant from its menu. Bound in leather and devoid of prices, it hints at Mi-chelin stars; laminated in plastic and offering a choice of proteins for each dish, it does not. The words used are also revealing, according to Dan Jurafsky, a linguist and computer scientist at Stanford University, in "The Language of Food". His decoding of food-related texts is the most original aspect of a work that is entertaining and revealing throughout. Mr Jurafsky ploughed through the descriptions of 650,000 dishes on 6,500 menus. Mid-range restaurants repeatedly insist that their food is "fresh"; this "over-mentioning", he explains, is a symptom of status anxiety. Cheap eateries swear their food is "real". Expensive restaurants avoid such terms. The mere mention that the crab is real or the plums ripe is sufficient to conjure in diners' minds the possibility that they might not be-the "maxim of relevance" in linguistic terms.
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